I love the smell of data in the morning!
Interesting and surprising statistics about digital media and devices. Compiled & curated by Dan Calladine, Aegis Media - dan.calladine@aemedia.com -
All views expressed are my own. Please email me if you have any queries, amendments or suggestions. Follow me on twitter - I'm @dancall

"Roughly 70% of Snapchat users are women, the chief executive of the messaging app said at a closed-door Goldman Sachs conference Wednesday.
Co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said Snapchat users are sending 400 million “snaps” a day on the service, where messages disappear after a few seconds, according to a person who was present at the meeting. He said half of Snapchat’s users have tried out “stories,” a feature the company introduced last month to link multiple messages together."
Source: WSJ, 20th November 2013

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

Source: Natsal, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, 26th November 2013
Full Infographic here
Lancet papers here
Methodology:
"Over 15,000 adults aged 16-74 participated in interviews between September 2010 and August 2012. Studying this large representative sample of people living in Britain enabled the researchers to produce key estimates on patterns of sexual behaviour, attitudes, health, and wellbeing across the population. Two previous Natsal surveys have taken place, in 1990 and 2000, making it one of the biggest and most comprehensive studies of sexual behaviour undertaken in a single country."
Note - Yes, I know that this isn't a 'digital stat' but I think this (& other findings in the surveys) is a great example of how people's attitudes and behaviour can change over time. I often hear people say 'people don't change, technology does' and while I agree with that to a degree (often motivations don't change...) people do change, and society does change...

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

""Doctor Who" marked its 50th anniversary over the weekend by setting a few ratings records.
"Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor" -- the official semicentennial special of the cult British sci-fi series -- rounded up 3.6 million total Whovians on Saturday, according to Nielsen.
That included 2.4 million viewers for the daytime airing of the much-anticipated special, which was beamed live to 94 countries around the world to avoid spoilers. That was a best-ever rating for BBC America, which carries "Doctor Who" in the U.S.
The rest of the U.S. audience came from a repeat on BBC America during Saturday prime time.
As befitting its status as a cult favorite, "Doctor Who" also burned up social media over the weekend.
There were 14.5 million views of "Doctor Who's" Tumblr on Saturday, more than for any other televised event, including the Super Bowl and the MTV Video Music Awards.
But the American ratings paled beside those in the U.K., where "Doctor Who" is an institution. The BBC said that 10.6 million Britons watched the program."

Tuesday, 12 November 2013

"China’s 11/11 online shopfest – the country’s equivalent of America’s Cyber Monday – has just finished. It’s been a record-smashing mega-sale on hundreds of e-stores. Here at Alibaba HQ, the makers of China’s top online marketplaces are celebrating the biggest-ever shopping day: a grand total of $5.7 billion (RMB 35.02 billion) spent in the course of just 24 hours.
(Update: Total unique visitors on Tmall on this 11/11 hit 402 million, up from 213 million on the same day last year). The sales on Alibaba’s Tmall involved over 20,000 merchants on its online marketplace. That massive $5.7 billion figure counts only Tmall and Taobao customers who paid via the company’s own Alipay (like Paypal), so the total spending amount will be higher once all payment methods are totalled up. The most popular store on Tmall all day was the official shop of Xiaomi, China’s upstart phone-maker."

Monday, 11 November 2013

"John Lewis's latest Christmas campaign prompted its biggest response on Twitter yet, with 80% of nearly 90,000 mentions praising the TV ad.
The ad, ‘The Bear and the Hare’, debuted on ITV’s ‘The X Factor’ on Saturday night 9 November and prompted 86,300 mentions on Twitter over the weekend, according to research from agency We Are Social.
This was up from 66,800 mentions, or 29%, from its launch weekend last year – some way short of the stellar 265% increase in conversations between 2011 and 2012.
Mentions peaked at 31,200 between 8pm and 9pm on Saturday evening, with 4,700 tweets sent between 8:17pm and 8:18 pm alone. Of the tweeters, 30% were male and 70% were female.
Some 80% of the tweets praised the ad, describing it as "cute" and "sweet", while 5% of tweeters claimed the ad had reduced them to tears. Only 1% of tweets were outright negative about the ad and John Lewis.
The campaign also had a positive impact on the brand’s social media presence. Over the weekend, John Lewis acquired 7,000 new Twitter followers, 12,000 new Facebook fans and 4,600 additional subscribers on YouTube."

Source: Marketing Magazine, 11th November 2013
Note - I'm assuming that this was just on Saturday and Sunday - there were lots of mentions on Friday when the ad first appeared on YouTube but I'm assuming that this is for TV only

"Mobile opens continued their climb toward 50% by gaining another percentage point last month. Emails opened on smartphones and tablets now account for 48% of total opens. Of course, that increase in mobile opens always has to come from somewhere: in September, desktop opens increased to 33%, while webmail opens dipped to 19%.
Mobile opens have gained 10 percentage points since September 2012, while webmail clients have lost that same amount. Interestingly enough, desktop clients have remained relatively flat over the last year. There were some bumps along the road but no overall change from twelve months ago.
iPad and iPhone dominate mobile opens, with a combined total of nearly 80%. Android makes up a respectable 20% of opens, which BlackBerry and Windows Phone combine to represent less than 1%. Growth for each mobile OS has been slow and steady increases across the board."

Thursday, 7 November 2013

"On the subject of advertising, Systrom stressed that Instagram is taking it slow, and working with a handful of partners like Ben & Jerry’s and watch-maker Michael Kors to ensure the ads are pleasing; he boasted that 5 percent of the ad images have received “likes.” He also noted that location and proximity data are integral to the company’s future, but that Instagram is still exploring how to achieve a balance between the appeal of location information with users’ desire for privacy."
Source: Kevin Systrom of Instagram interviewed by GigaOM, 6th November 2013
Note - I expect that these levels will inevitably fall as the ads get more commonplace...

"The post generated 33,000 new followers for Michael Kors
That’s 16 times the average number for the brand’s past 5 non-promoted posts, which were all featured on Insatgram’s popular pagemichaelkors-ad-followers-gained
The ad generated 370% more likes and was likely seen by 6.7MM People
The post generated more than 218,000 likes within 18 hours, 370% more likes than the average of their last five posts.
According to Nitrogram. judging by this time decay in likes and reach as compared to their five previous posts it was likely the ad was shown only once in the user’s feed, unlike on other networks where promoted posts stay longer in the feed."

Monday, 4 November 2013

"The near-ubiquity of cell phone ownership and the rapid rise of smartphones has created a platform for mobile photo- and video-sharing. This survey found that 92% of Americans own a cell phone, and 58% own a smartphone. Mobile apps like Instagram and Snapchat have capitalized on user bases equipped and eager to capture and share visual moments. This is our first read on Snapchat and the first time we have asked cell phone owners about Instagram. We found:
9% of cell phone owners use Snapchat, the photo- and video-sharing app that automatically deletes images after they have been viewed.
18% of cell phone owners use Instagram, a photo- and video-sharing social media app with signature filters, recently acquired by Facebook."

"The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, for the three months to September 2013, shows Windows Phone now makes up one in 10 smartphone sales across the five major European markets, has overtaken iOS in Italy, and is gaining momentum in emerging markets. Android remains the dominant operating system across Europe with 71.9%, an increase of 4.2 percentage points compared with the same period last year.

Windows Phone, driven almost entirely by Nokia sales, continues to make rapid progress in Europe and has also shown signs of growth in emerging markets such as Latin America.

[...]

In Britain, Windows accounts for 11.4% of the market. Android is still the number one operating system with 58.4% while BlackBerry now only has 3.1%. Apple’s iOS has dipped by 1.0 percentage point to 27.0%, although it is expected to strengthen at Christmas.

[...]

Compared with August Windows Phone made significant gains in Italy, where its once again above 10% market share, and in Spain, where it rose from 2.2 to 3.7% share. There was also strong progress in Australia, where it went from 6.5 to 9.3% of the market, while there was a slight rebound in USA from 3% to 4.6% market share. In other markets Windows Phone generally remained generally static, which is good news given the iPhone 5S and 5C launch. Overall it grew from 9.2 to 9.8% of the EU5 countries, less than 7% away from iOS market share in the region.